Sir Paul Anthony Mellars FBA FSA (29 October 1939 – 7 May 2022)[1] was a British archaeologist and professor of prehistory and human evolution at the University of Cambridge.
)[2] Mellars obtained his MA, PhD and ScD degrees at the University of Cambridge, where he was a student at Fitzwilliam College.
[5] After his PhD, Mellars taught for ten years in the Archaeology Department at Sheffield University before returning to Cambridge in 1980, where he became a fellow of Corpus Christi College.
Mellars' recent research concentrated on the behaviour and archaeology of Neanderthal populations in Europe, and their replacement by Homo sapiens 40,000 years ago.
He carried out excavations on early Mesolithic sites at Oronsay in the Inner Hebrides in Scotland and published the results from work at Star Carr in North Yorkshire.